Page 52 of When Ice Queens Collide
“I’m not going to soften that. I’d rather you hear it from me than wonder later if I was lying about how much I had meant to acquire Vaughn Industries.”
Alexandra was quiet. Simone counted three steps in the gravel trail before Alexandra’s thumb moved across the back of her hand. It was the smallest gesture, a single movement of maybe half an inch before she was still again, and it almost stopped Simone where she was standing. She had expected, somewhere in her body, that Alexandra would let go atI would have won. That was the opposite of letting go and putting space between them.
Simone’s eyes burned with unshed tears, and she forced herself to keep walking.
“What changed?” Alexandra asked.
“Elements.”
There was a pause, and the ground was rising again. Simone could hear Alexandra’s breathing match the climb.
“I called you by your first name that night,” Simone explained. “I told myself that I did to get access and get you to lower your walls. I do that with everyone. But I came home that night and lay in bed and thought about why I had actually doneit. And it wasn’t my usual tactic. I wanted the sound of your name in my mouth.”
She heard her own accent come up under the last word. The Montreal warmth she'd spent thirty years sanding down. She didn't smooth it back.
“I thought I could manage it,” she said. “I'd been attracted to people I’ve gone up against across negotiating tables before, and it had never compromised anything. I told myself this would be the same.”
“And?”
Simone took a breath, and it caught somewhere below her sternum and stayed there.
“There were weeks when I was lying to myself and didn’t realize it. Then there were weeks when I knew I was lying and kept doing it out of self-preservation. I remember there was a night in November when I came out here in the rain and I stopped at a tree on this trail and I couldn't tell myself the lie anymore. I went home and got on a call with Audrey to accelerate the timeline. I told her I was being aggressive, but the truth was I was just running."
“From me,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
Simone paused to consider her words carefully. “From the fact that I didn't want to leave.”
Alexandra stopped walking. She didn't pull her hand away. She turned, just her body, and Simone turned with her. They stood under the firs. The light fell through the branches in those soft, uneven patches, and Alexandra's face was in one of them. Her eyes were trained on Simone's, and Simone could not look anywhere else.
“You came to my office in November,” Alexandra said. “With the merger offer.”
“Yes.”
“Was that part of your strategy?”
“Yes. And it was me trying to create a structure where I didn't have to leave. I didn't know that consciously when I drafted it, though I knew it when you said no.”
Alexandra's face did something Simone had not seen it do before. The corners of her mouth pulled down, controlled, and her shoulders lowered a quarter of an inch. Simone felt it in their clasped hands—the hold relaxed, then tightened, then settled again.
“Keep going,” Alexandra encouraged.
They started walking again, and Simone had to wait for her throat to open before she could continue.
“The night I came to your office in December. After you refused the merger…”
“I remember.”
“I was furious. And I wanted to hurt you. I'd been wanting you for two months, and you'd said no to the only plan I had for it. That broke something in me, and I walked over telling myself I would feel nothing afterward."
“Did you?”
“No,” she admitted, and the word came out rougher than she'd planned. She kept her eyes on the trail.
“I lay awake afterward. I tried to plan an exit. I'd planned exits my whole life. That night my brain wouldn't make one…because I didn't want one. That was the first time I understood what trouble I was in.”
Alexandra's hand pressed against hers, brief, then steadier.
“I want to ask you something,” Alexandra said.
